Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  “This other information Cameron passed on . . . well, I’m not so sure what to think about it.”

  “The interference patterns?” Aimes asked.

  “That, and this whole concept of nested bubbles of light. I really can’t make out what he was saying about that. Anybody?”

  “Cameron may be bringing his, ah, unusual point of view to this,” General Sergei Ulanov said. A brusque, bald man with a bushy mustache, Ulanov was, like Katya, originally from New America’s Ukrainian colony and tended to defer to her. “Senator? Can you elaborate on that?”

  “Not very much. I don’t understand all of what he was saying either. Maybe, in time . . .”

  “Could the fact that we don’t understand it all be a reflection of the advanced technology?” Taki Oe wondered.

  Mendoza gave Taki a sour look. “More likely it means the message was garbled. Or incomplete.”

  “I think we can trust the records,” Vic replied. He manipulated the controls from his tabletop interface. The Device hovering above the holoprojector vanished, replaced by a three-dimensional view of the granulated, glowing surface of one of the white dwarfs. A ship—they were thinking of them now as Starminers—emerged from the surface, a minute black speck trailing an arrowhead-shaped wake of roiling stellar atmosphere. “This is what amazes me,” he said quietly. “Think of it! To plumb the depths of a star! The technology that implies. My God! The surface gravity of a white dwarf must be in the tens of thousands of Gs, and the pressures in there are unimaginable! What these people are capable of . . .”

  “What they are capable of,” Katya said with an almost rude abruptness, “is genocide. Worse than genocide. They annihilated an entire civilization, and as far as Dev could tell, they weren’t even aware of what they were doing.”

  “Ah! But wouldn’t a deliberate act be worse?” Mendoza wanted to know. “If it was an accident—”

  “Scary thought,” Vic said. “Wiping out a whole civilization by accident.”

  “We nearly did it ourselves a time or two,” Daren said. “I wonder, though. If this Web is significantly more advanced than we are, perhaps it wasn’t so much a matter of either deliberate genocide or accident as it was, well, overlooking that other civilization. If they were as far beyond us as we are beyond, say, cockroaches . . .”

  “I would expect a civilization as advanced as that to have some corresponding advancement in their moral perceptions,” Aimes said stiffly. “Certain civilized concepts, such as vegetarianism on moral grounds, cannot develop without highly advanced—”

  “We don’t all have your refined moral sense, General,” Mendoza said sarcastically. “Even those of us who may be superintelligent. Or highly advanced.”

  Aimes bristled. “I eat vegetables and meat nanogrown from nonliving materials because I believe it wrong to eat animals. A moral decision, but one impossible if we were still savages. That is my point, not that I’m better than any of the rest of you.”

  “However much she may believe that she is,” Mendoza added to Sandoval.

  “Can we stick to the subject, please?” Vic said, interceding as General Aimes glowered across the table. Damn . . . humans were confronting Armageddon for the entire species . . . and here they were squabbling over vegetarianism and alien morals. . . .

  “Somehow,” Katya said, “I doubt that the Web has the same moral perceptions we do. The DalRiss cherish life, remember, but they also use it as we use tools.”

  “Maybe, to the Web, we are food animals,” Taki put in. “Or our stars are sources of raw materials for this, this incredible technology we’ve glimpsed. Or—”

  “Such speculation is pointless right now,” Mendoza said.

  “I disagree, General,” Katya said. “It is of vital importance that we know how the Web perceives us. What they expect of us.”

  “What I want to know more than anything else,” Howell added, “is just exactly how reliable is our source?” He was addressing the room at large, but he was staring at Katya when he spoke.

  Vic was about to answer for her, but she glanced at him and gave him a tiny shake of the head.

  “The entity we call Dev Cameron,” she said carefully, “cannot any longer be regarded as human . . . not the way we use the word, at any rate.” She hesitated, then drew a deep breath, bracing herself. Vic could sense her struggle to keep her feelings about Dev under tight control. “The Naga and the DalRiss think differently than we do—I think we all understand that. They perceive their surroundings differently and with different senses, and because of those differences they form a different picture of the universe around them, a different worldview that does not always entirely correspond to our own.”

  “You’re saying they’re alien,” Aimes said, and the others laughed.

  “And Dev Cameron is alien now as well,” Katya said. “I’m not entirely sure just how alien he is, but he certainly does not perceive things the same way we do. But the important thing is that he still retains his basic identity with the human species. He identifies with us. He cares about what happens to us, as a species at any rate. I . . . I’m not sure if he can relate to us as individuals any longer, but he wants what is best for the human race as a whole.”

  “What,” Admiral Bruce Roberts, of the Confederation Navy, said. “Even the Japanese?” He glanced at Taki, then shrugged. “Or the Imperials, I should say.”

  “Even the Imperials, Admiral,” Katya said. “Maybe especially the Imperials since they’re the custodians of Earth. I don’t know. I don’t think that politics are very important to him anymore.”

  Sandoval stirred, restless. “How about that? We have one war on our hands already with the Empire. Which side would he be on, when the Imperials start sending in their ryus?”

  “Is he even aware that we have a war brewing here?” Aimes asked.

  “We could ask him,” Taki pointed out.

  “And it would prove nothing,” Katya said. “He can certainly remember being in the Confederation Navy back during the war. He can remember why he did what he did then. He can remember serving the Hegemony before that, before he deserted to join the Rebellion. But now, well, my impression is that trying to identify with one bunch of humans against another is like trying to muster some deep emotion over the extinction of the dinosaurs on Earth. It happened a very long time ago, and to somebody else. It’s no longer important.”

  “From Dev’s viewpoint,” Vic added, “what is important is not the Imperials. It’s this threat from Outside.”

  “And he may be right,” Daren said. “The DalRiss attempts to communicate with the Web weren’t very successful. From what I was able to pick up, the Web doesn’t talk. It doesn’t discuss. It tells.”

  General Aimes studied Daren for a moment, her elbows propped on the table, her hands folded in front of her face. “Tell me, Doctor. What is your assessment of the Web? Just what is it? Where did it come from?”

  “If it’s all machines, like Cameron says,” Howell added, “someone had to build it in the first place. To program it.”

  “Obviously,” Daren said. “My . . . impression is that the Web is a lot like the Naga in some ways, like they were in the bad old days when we thought of them as Xenophobes. Their view of the universe is skewed by their perception of self.”

  “That was Cameron’s speculation,” Mendoza pointed out.

  “And I think it was an accurate one,” Daren replied. “Naga divide the entire universe into self and not-self. The Web sees the entire universe as self.”

  “What,” Admiral Roberts said. “It thinks it’s God?”

  “I doubt that it thinks in those terms, Admiral,” Taki said. “But you could look at it as a communal intelligence, a hive-mind, if you like. We’re not even certain yet that the Web is self-aware, at least, not in the same sense we are.”

  “ ‘Self-aware’ is ‘I think, therefore I am,’ ” Aimes said. “What’s so damned hard about that?”

  “It’s more than that,” Daren put in. “
I think self-awareness also means you can distinguish between yourself and somebody else, and that’s where the Web is lacking. Its mind is made up of billions of separate parts. Those parts communicate. It’s aware of the rest of the cosmos as what doesn’t communicate . . . but it seems to regard the noncommunicative part of the universe as a kind of extension of itself. The way you might think about your foot, say, being an extension of yourself.”

  “When I step on something sharp in my bare feet,” Aimes said, “my foot communicates, believe me.”

  “But do you think of your foot as a part of you?” Taki asked her. “I mean, as part of your ego? Your real, inner self? Or is the real you a wrapped-up package of thoughts and memories and sensations located somewhere just behind your eyes?”

  “Dev Cameron lost his entire physical body,” Katya added. “But he’s still Dev.”

  “You said he wasn’t,” Roberts said.

  “I said he’s changed, Admiral. His experiences over the past twenty-five years have changed him. That’s true of all of us, isn’t it?”

  “What you’re saying, Doctor,” Vic said to Taki, “is that the Web might think of us as part of itself. Something to be used, tools or raw materials.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Self and tools aren’t the same thing,” Aimes insisted.

  Taki glanced at Aimes. “Perhaps a better analogy than your foot would have been raw materials, resources. If you could imagine yourself as a primitive, living in a cave, but thinking of the rocks there as something as much a part of your body, of your perception of self, as your arm, say—”

  “Then I would have a perfect right to bash rocks together to make flint tools,” Aimes said, picking up the thought. “And to use those tools to make other tools. I think I see your point.”

  Daren reached out and touched the interface. The image above the holoprojector zoomed in close on one of the sleekly organic spacecraft rising from a sun. “I think they may not be able to differentiate between intelligence and, well, the expression of intelligence.”

  “What do you mean?” Howell asked. “That they confuse technology with the technologists?”

  “That, and more,” Daren said. “There is a kind of intelligence that deliberately seeks to manipulate its environment.”

  “I’d take that as a fair definition of intelligence,”

  “Not necessarily. Think of the Communes, on Dante. They manipulate their environment. But as far as we can tell, they’re not intelligent.”

  “Not our kind of intelligence, perhaps,” Vic said.

  “Okay. Termites, on Earth, then. Or glowcoral on Eridu. Social animals. Builders. But not intelligence. Evolution has shaped the community as a whole to express itself in ways that seem intelligent to us, but individually the members of the community are not.

  “At the other end of the scale are animals like dolphins. Or the Zeta Doradan Maia. They demonstrate remarkable mental abilities. They may, in fact, be intelligent in every way that counts . . . yet because they are completely atechnic we don’t have enough in common with them for anything like rational communication.”

  “What are you saying, Doctor?” Aimes asked. “That the Web isn’t really intelligent? Or that it’s too different for the question to have any meaning for us?”

  “Something of both, I think. Humans and DalRiss have both been at least partly defined by their use of tools to reshape their environments. I suspect that the tools themselves define the Web’s intelligence. As with termites, or Communes, individual Web machines probably have no more intelligence than, oh, a fairly bright insect. Maybe just enough intelligence, in fact, to follow orders.”

  “The very clear thought in the alien recordings,” Taki added, “is that it had encountered a part of itself that was noncommunicative . . . and was somehow refusing direction. What was it it said, exactly?”

  ” ‘Part of the Web has refused direction,’ ” Katya replied, her eyes closed as she downloaded the text, ” ‘and has become dangerous. Integrate . . . re-integrate.’ Something then about the Web cell being corrupted and needing to be destroyed.”

  “Machines that don’t follow orders,” Mendoza said, following Daren’s thread of logic, “have to be re-integrated. Or destroyed.”

  “Or simply used, as part of the environment,” Daren said. “If it doesn’t respond to the Web as a part of the Web, it’s fair game.”

  “The attack could be perceived as a kind of auto-immune response,” Sandoval pointed out. “Antibodies failing to recognize intruding substances as self, and attacking them.”

  “A fair analogy, General,” Mendoza agreed. “I question whether this immune response would extend to us out here, as Cameron seems to fear. Why would they want to destroy us? We’ve not threatened them, and we’re a long, long way from the Galactic Core.”

  “They’ve also been out in our neck of the woods for a good many thousands of years, General,” Katya pointed out. Twelve hundred light years was a walk in the park compared to the twenty-seven-thousand-light-year distance to the core of the Galaxy. “If your auto-immune-response analogy is accurate . . . suppose they do think of the whole universe as their body? Or even just this galaxy? They might be aware of us as a kind of disease.”

  “A cancer,” Daren said. “Cells that have stopped responding to orders and are growing wild.”

  “That’s an interesting thought, Daren,” Katya said. “You know, we could be missing something here. We’ve been thinking of the probe as a kind of body for the duplicate download of Dev . . . but what was the probe, really? A Naga fragment, serving as hardware for the Dev-copy’s software.”

  “It recognized the Naga as self . . .” Taki said, excited. “Then thought of it as part of the Web that had stopped communicating, stopped taking orders.”

  “Are you saying the Naga are part of the Web?” Vic asked. “Or that they used to be?”

  “I don’t think we have enough information to make any useful hypotheses, Vic,” Katya said. “But we certainly have some good leads. I submit that Dr. Cameron and Dr. Oe be put in charge of researching everything we know about the Web. Questioning a planetary Naga might give us some new insights.”

  “Especially if we could find a Naga that recognized the Web as a part of its past,” Daren said. “Naga memory threads go back a long, long way. With this, we might trigger the appropriate memories and learn a lot more.”

  “Do it,” Katya said. She exchanged a glance with Vic. “We’re going to have to go public with all of this, you know. Bring it out in the open so we can deal with it.”

  “Agreed,” Vic said. “There’s still a big question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Our, ah, war with the Imperials.”

  “We seem to have been given a choice of wars,” Mendoza said. “War with the Empire. War with this machine intelligence.”

  “Not that simple, General,” Katya said, “and you know it. We’re going to have to bring the Empire in on this, too. Work with them.”

  “What!” Sandoval almost rose from his seat. “Senator, you can’t be serious!”

  “I am serious, General,” Katya said softly. “Dead serious. If we don’t find a way now to stop this war with the Empire, then the Web is going to find us divided and distracted when it arrives. And it will arrive. It knows we exist, and it can’t afford to ignore us. Whether it thinks we’re a disease or a disobedient offshoot of itself or whatever, it won’t ignore us. I agree with Dev on this. The Web represents the greatest threat mankind has ever faced, greater than the Xenophobes by far for the simple fact that we can’t communicate with them.

  “Our only chance will be if we can form a united front with the Imperials.”

  “An . . . alliance?” Sandoval asked, still disbelieving. “With the Empire?”

  “The Confederation can’t muster the resources to face the Web, General,” Katya said. “Maybe, maybe Mankind can. I don’t know if we can face the threat that Dev showed us, even united. But we have
got to try.

  “Humanity no longer can afford the luxury of being divided against itself.”

  Chapter 19

  In large-scale warfare, it is essential to cause upset. It is critical to attack resolutely where enemies are not expecting it; then while their minds are unsettled, use this to your advantage to take the initiative and win.

  In individual combat, you appear relaxed at first, then suddenly charge powerfully; as the opponent’s mind changes pitch, it is essential that you follow what he does, not letting him relax for a moment, perceiving the advantage of the moment and discerning right then and there how to win.

  —The Fire Scroll,

  Book of the Five Spheres

  MIYAMOTO MUSASHI

  seventeenth century C.E.

  “You may go in now, Madam Senator.”

  Katya bowed. “Arigato gozaimasu.”

  “Don’t mention it, please,” the aide said in lightly accented Inglic. “The ambassador has been most anxious to see you this morning.”

  I’ll just bet he has, Katya thought. She’d not been looking forward to this interview at all. She smiled at the aide, though, as he slid the light frame door to the side, nodding her thanks. Stepping out of her shoes, she left them outside the door and went inside in her bare feet.

  Ambassador Kazuhiro Mishima was a tall and elegant man, reportedly a member of the royal family and reportedly, too, a member of the powerful faction known as the Kansai no Otoko, the Men of Completion. He stood and smiled urbanely as Katya walked in—unusual for a traditional Nihonjin, especially in the presence of a gaijin woman.

  “Konichiwa, O-Taishisan,” she said, bowing low. “Good day, honored Ambassador.”

  “It is I who am honored by your coming to see me here,” Mishima said in perfect, if somewhat stilted Inglic. “An ambassador expects to be summoned by senators and rulers, not to have them attend him.”

  “I thought, under the circumstances, it would be more . . . polite this way.”